Anchor
Dr. CHOW-QUESADA Emily S. M., Department of English Language and Literature
Co-anchor
Dr. TAM Daisy Dic Sze, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing
Introduction
Minority Studies/Marginalized Populations Studies focuses on a wide variety of minority groups (ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic), and explores how an understanding of issues relating to minority identity, well-being, and forms of cultural production can contribute to the empowerment of such communities within mainstream society. Examples of broad areas of interest within this sub-theme include self-representation in minority literatures, healthcare communication in ethnic minority contexts, and minority rights.
On going Project:
”Untold Hong Kong Stories: multimedia narratives from the margins”
- Collects and documents the voices of the marginalized in Hong Kong (HK) via a series of podcasts, comic books, and digital archives
- Spectrum: gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, occupation, age, and body, language
- In a season of podcasts and comic books we plan to launch, speakers will share their stories on displacement, adaptability, role-playing, and shape-shifting as they come to terms with everyday life in HK, including during the COVID-19 crisis
Previous Project & Event:
”Transition and Violence” Book Exhibition
Date: 5 -31 Oct, 2022
Location: Level 3, Au Shue Hung Memorial Library, HKBU
Dr. Emily Chow-Quesada collaborated with Africa Center Hong Kong (ACHK) to organise “Transition and Violence Book Exhibition” and “African Literature in HK: a conversation” with the support of the HKBU Library in September 2022. The exhibition looked at how African literature encompasses colonial, despotic, racial, and patriarchal violence as well as writers’ personal stories of transition. The exhibition also featured selected posters of students taking the course, ENGL 2025 “The Art of Storytelling” as research outputs of the service-learning projects they worked on with ACHK From January to April 2022. “African Literature in HK: a conversation” invited Innocent Mutanga (Founder & CEO of Africa Center Hong Kong) and Daniela Alam (Educator, Author, Creator, & Host of the Podcast Series, Africa’s Lit) to have a dialogue on various critical issues of African Literature in HK.
Recording by HKBU Library: http://hkbutube.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/st/display.php?bibno=st1073
“The New Normal: Together Apart”
Dr. Daisy Tam (HMW), Dr. Emily Chow-Quesada (ENG), Dr. Jason Ho (CISL), and Dr. Evelyn Kwok (AVA)
The research sets out to document voices from the margins and to use digital story-telling as a method to explore the challenges experienced by marginalized populations during the pandemic. This study took place 2 years into the pandemic, where social distancing, travel restrictions have become part of the “new normal”, and limits on sociality further exacerbated the effects of displacement, exclusion, and isolation. The stories in this pilot series acknowledges their hardships and struggles, but also captures the strength, courage, adaptability and resilience of the individuals interviewed. The interviewees represented three different marginalized populations
- Siu Fung represented the queer community and told her story through the lens of bodybuilding;
- Innocent Mutanga represented the black diaspora in Hong Kong as well as told his history as a political refugee and
- Crystal Mae Poras told her story of being a domestic worker in Hong Kong as well as her identity as a Buddhist and kickboxer.
Each of these stories showed different types and aspects of marginalization which ontributed to important reflections by the community.
“110%HK presents: Together Apart a videocast launching event"
The pilot series titled “Together Apart” was launched on social media (IG and YouTube) with a physical event on the 12th June at Current Plans – a small event space in a walkup building near Sham Shui Po. The physical event was impactful. We conducted surveys and interviews on the spot. Apart from capturing testimonials, we also held focus group interviews were also conducted with a smaller selection of participants to solicit deeper insights.
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/110percent.hk/
Youtube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@110hk9
Members' Recent Work :
“Echo: black female artists in Hong Kong” Documentary by Dr. Emily Chow-Quesada (ENG)
This documentary is about black women artists in Hong Kong. It is also about empowerment and self-representations. In Hong Kong, where blackness is very much defined by biased mediatic representations, this documentary lets the artists speak to the general public directly. What art forms do we produce? How do these art forms address female subjectivities and challenge the notions of beauty and femineity? What does it mean to create arts and articulate self-representations as black women artists in HK? The documentary aspires to break not only stereotypes, but also invisible boundaries within Hong Kong and allude to those among different black communities over the world.
Publications by Dr. Marija TODOROVA (TIIS)
Todorova, Marija. 2022. "Translating refugee culinary cultures Hong Kong’s narratives of integration." Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association, Volume 17, Issue 1, p. 88 – 110
Based on interviews with representatives from two charities and analysis of two cookbooks and a website with food-related refugee stories, this article investigates food preparation by asylum seekers as a translation activity influenced by food materiality and its cultural significance.
Todorova, Marija. 2021. “Interpreting for Refugees in Hong Kong.” In Interpreting Conflict: A Comparative Framework edited by Marija Todorova, and Lucía Ruiz Rosendo, Cham: PalgraveMacMillan.
This chapter takes a historical perspective on the specifics of interpreting for refugees grounding its findings in analysis of oral histories on interpreting during the Indochina refugee crisis, as well as interviews with contemporary interpreters who have been involved in interpreting for refugee and asylum seekers in Hong Kong at the present.
Translating for South Asians in Preparation for Crisis Workshop Series by Clara YU (TIIS)
Situated under the circumstances of natural disasters and emergencies, this workshop series aims to introduce to the South Asian community members living in Hong Kong the basic knowledge and skills of translation so that they can exert their own agency and help each other in times of crisis.
